


If the Fates Allow

by Carlanime



Category: Oxford Time Travel universe - Willis
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Holiday, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:06:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carlanime/pseuds/Carlanime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ned and Verity visit 1889 New York to retrieve a deck of cards and prevent an incongruity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If the Fates Allow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blushingflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blushingflower/gifts).



Pregnancy hormones, a host of books had assured me, affected people in any number of ways. They were affecting my darling wife by making her maudlin and giddy in turns, and causing her to exhibit a hitherto unguessed-at affinity for twentieth-century Christmas carols. For days now the various programmable appliances in our flat had been imploring me to have myself a merry little Christmas, a directive with which I'd have been happy to comply, if only I'd found myself amongst a little more general merriment.

As things stood, the latest snarls with the Net had had all research at a standstill for weeks. Dunworthy was looking stressed, Lady Shrapnell -- who didn't believe in snarls -- was livid, and even the unflappable Finch was looking a bit frayed around the edges. Worst of all, Verity had somehow convinced herself that the whole thing was an elaborate ruse, concocted to keep her from time-travelling while she was _enceinte_. It was an entirely irrational notion, but pointing that out, I'd swiftly learned, did nothing to improve matters. She looked more beautiful than ever in the Victorian tea gowns Peggy Warder had unexpectedly whipped up for her, but like Warder, she'd begun to shoot fire and sprout glaring eyes. I was starting to feel a bit singed.

In desperation, I'd taken myself off to Balliol, intending to plead with Dunworthy to send her somewhere, anywhere, just long enough to disabuse her of the idea that we were confining her. If she could pop off now for a spot of research, I'd reasoned, there was every chance she'd feel more like herself. Then she could spend her third trimester at home, in a more cheerful frame of mind. All the books stressed that the second trimester was ideal for travel, and I was willing to take their word for it. If she didn't get to go do something interesting soon, I wasn't going to be held responsible for what might happen. I'd already heard her talking in conspiratorial tones with Lady Shrapnell, and it was keeping me awake nights. What if they were plotting to hijack the Net for one of Lady Shrapnell's various schemes?

"We didn't kidnap him," Finch was saying patiently into a handheld when I arrived. "We don't even particularly want him. No, that is not a slur on one of your researchers! Mr. Henry, you can't go in there. Look, we have every intention of sending him back, but he needs to return the cards."

"I'll return them," I said promptly. "Verity and I." I had no idea what cards, or where he wanted them returned, but I was seizing whatever chance I could. "Old pros at returning stuff, us. Well, me anyway."  
Finch gave me a slightly exasperated look. "I know you want him back, but it is imperative that the cards be returned to their proper time and location."

"I'll do it." I gave him my brightest smile.

"That's no one," he told whoever it was he was talking to. "Just one of our historians." Which stung slightly, but I let it pass. "No, he can't return them for you. He--" Finch blinked at the handheld. "He hung up," he said, sounding baffled.

"So you need some cards returned." I sounded like the overly-helpful title of a self-improvement guide, but that couldn't be helped. "Really, Finch, let us do it. Wait. You're not returning them to a battlefield, are you? I was hoping for something more like a drop to a very tranquil, but obviously profoundly important, whist drive. Somewhere in the country, maybe."

"This could blow up into an International Incident," Finch said darkly, which didn't sound much like a whist drive, unless perhaps Josephine had been hosting it while Napoleon was busy. Had they had whist then? To be honest I wasn't entirely sure what whist was, just that people played it in peaceful, non-battlefield conditions, where a pregnant naiad might safely drop something off and perhaps do a spot of not-too-strenuous research.

"Finch," said Verity's voice behind me, and I spun around guiltily. Her eyes narrowed. "What's going on?"

"Nothing!" I said, too cheerfully; she looked doubly suspicious.

"Are you doing a drop?"

"We," I said hastily. "Us. Together." Her eyes widened with delight.

"Oh, Ned, finally. I'm half mad with boredom. They've unsnarled whatever it was, then?"

"No," said Finch darkly. "It's worse than ever. One of Fujisaki's students just experienced major slippage."

"Where was he trying to go?" I asked. By now Dunworthy had joined us, looking baffled.

"That's just it," Dunworthy said. "He got where he was trying to go: Kyoto, Japan, 1889. He was picking up a nonsignificant object--a pack of handmade playing cards. But there was slippage on his return."

"There's no slippage on return drops," Verity corrected him automatically.

"There was on this one," Dunworthy said grimly. "He ended up in New York, still in 1889, and we located him before his own lab did, so we brought him here."

"So all's well, then," I said.

"No," said Finch. "All's not well at all. He left the cards. In the lobby of his hotel, he thinks, though he was so alarmed at having wound up in New York that I doubt he knows for sure."

I thought about this for a moment. Playing cards had been put to a few historically interesting uses. In New France they'd been used as currency in 1685, due to a shortage of real currency. And in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century the American military had used them as training aids, printing them with the likenesses of wanted Iraqis, and with information about Middle East antiquities. But I couldn't recall a single instance of a particular deck of cards proving crucial.

"Does it matter?" Verity was asking. "If the cards are from 1889 anyway, is it important that they got left in New York?"

Dunworthy and Finch exchanged looks. "Possibly," said Dunworthy, removing his glasses and polishing them. "It would be better if this particular brand of cards not come to the attention of any of the New York contemps."

"Then we can return them." Verity beamed.

Finch looked horrified. "Surely not in your condition," he said weakly.

Verity looked outraged. She turned to Dunworthy, but he was already shaking his head. "I'm sorry, Kindle," he said, "but it probably isn't wise to risk introducing any additional variables into this situation. Ned can pop back to 1889, retrieve the deck of cards from the hotel lobby, and be back before you know it." He left Finch to fill me in on the details: Grand Central Hotel, December 1889, deck of Japanese-made mulberry leaf cards left in the lobby.

Verity glared at me -- unfair, since I'd had nothing to do with their decision -- all the way to the lab. Warder glared, too, out of all her eyes, when Verity fumed about hidebound attitudes and ridiculous male interference. I stood inside the net, trying to look invisible, or at least non-hidebound, while they commiserated over male ridiculousness and Warder shoved clothes and luggage at me. When the mutterings subsided I sighed with relief and tried to shoot Verity an apologetic look, but she wasn't meeting my eyes, and the mound of luggage Warder was piling in the net with me soon blocked her from view anyway. If anything, I appeared to be taking even more luggage through this time than when I'd been sent to return Princess Arjumand. I hoped there was nothing alive lurking in my bags this time.

"Two for New York, 1889," Warder said with satisfaction, and I was momentarily so distracted by the pleasant look on her face that I didn't catch the significance of that. Then Verity darted to my side, caught something Warder tossed after her, threw a grateful smile toward the console, and the net shimmered around us.

"You shouldn't have done that," I said weakly, but I could feel myself grinning with delight, and Verity was beaming back at me, and surely time travel in the second trimester isn't any more dangerous than taking a jet somewhere. Or a cruise. Or riding the subway, come to that. And once we emerged from the dark alley where we'd landed, New York was bustling around us, snow falling lightly on the hats and shoulders of package-carrying pedestrians and on the traffic that streamed past in front of us.

Verity struggled into the long coat Warder had thrown her at the last minute. The tea gowns, I realized belatedly, weren't just comfortably graceful maternity wear: they were ideal time-travel clothing, since they looked fashionable to the Victorians, and -- once again -- like long nightgowns to almost anyone else. "I've been had," I said accusingly, and she laughed with pure delight.

She tucked one arm into mine, then looked at the mound of luggage and reconsidered. "At least our hotel's only over there," she said, and pointed across several chaotic lanes of traffic to the Grand Central Hotel. She started off, striding fearlessly into traffic and leaving me to grapple with our several tonnes of luggage.

When I looked up, Verity had made it safely to a sort of island of grass in the centre of the traffic. I made it partway across, glanced back to see how far I'd come, and saw a dazed-looking young man staring off into space while horses and vehicles hurtled past him. I hesitated near-fatally, was almost run down by a speeding milk truck, and then dashed back to grab the fellow by the sleeve. We narrowly escaped death under the hooves of horses pulling a streetcar, and then we were safely on the island, where, I realized, Verity was no longer waiting. She waved to me from the far side of the street. At least she'd made it safely across.

The young man had realized, belatedly, that he'd been in mortal peril, and was thanking me profusely. "It's my final project," he said, and remarkably, I understood him. Being deep in research is a perfectly valid reason to lose track of one's immediate surroundings, in my experience, and for all I knew he had additional Lady Shrapnell-esque pressures of his own.

"I know the feeling," I said, and he pressed a card into my hand.

"I know this will sound like blowing my own horn," he said apologetically, "but if it works out, my new system of information management is going to pay off hugely. I'm hoping to form a company soon, and go after the contract for the next census." I had no idea what he was talking about, but smiled politely anyway. "Drop by some time and I'll get you in on the ground floor," he said earnestly, and I revised my opinion of him. Not your ordinary grad student, then, but some sort of snake-oil salesman.

I looked at his card. It listed his office as being at Columbia University's School of Mines, so I revised my opinion back again. Perhaps there really was some practical application of his research, and he stood on the brink of financial success. Not that I could possibly invest in it, of course, but it might mean that saving him from certain trampling had corrected whatever temporal anomaly the playing cards had been going to cause. I'd never heard of Herman Hollerith, but in a chaotic system, even unknown engineering students could play a pivotal role.

"Thanks awfully," I said, "but I'm expecting to be out of the country" -- and the century, I thought -- "so I don't think I'll have the chance to invest in anything."

He shrugged. "Hand it on to a friend, then," he advised. "Once my patent comes through, the sky's the limit."

* * * * * * *

Somehow I'd been expecting the hotel lobby to be, if not deserted, at least empty enough that we'd be able to spot a deck of cards lying somewhere waiting for us to pick them up. Instead, of course, the lobby was full of people: people at the reception desk, where at least a half dozen hotel staff were checking them in; people sitting and smoking and reading newspapers, making it impossible to see if there were decks of cards on any of the tables; people bustling in and out of the back, where I supposed there might be elevator banks, if elevators existed yet, or maybe the hotel restaurant.

For every person who looked like a guest of the hotel there was at least one bellboy, all of them dashing about with luggage under their arms or small dogs on leads or just dashing, all looking impossibly energetic compared with similarly-aged teenagers from our own century. Apparently lethargy and surliness hadn't been invented yet, or perhaps they just weren't faddish yet. Chipper smiles, slightly cheeky slang, and near-manic energy levels all seemed popular, though. Perhaps we'd slipped into an alternate universe altogether?

"Professor Peddick!" Verity exclaimed, and I turned to find him beaming at her.

"My dear Miss Brown." Then he saw me, and his smile widened. "Ah, no, it must be Mrs. Henry now. And perhaps you haven't heard that my nephew is also to be congratulated? Knew he'd like Maud; sensible girl. Tremendous row when she found out he'd been engaged, but after all, _amantium irae amoris integratio est_."

"Quite," I said, heading him off at the pass before we became hopelessly swamped with quotations. "In Oxford, are they?"

"Oh, no," he said. "They're here with me." He waved a hand vaguely, indicating the hotel, or maybe New York in general. "I'm afraid I must dash, but if you look around, you should find them." He bustled off, and I felt a momentary urge to go after him. Surely it wasn't safe to let him wander around on his own in New York. Who knew where he might fetch up.

From somewhere behind me I heard a voice which managed to be simultaneously awfully familiar and yet all wrong.

"Of course I'll miss the stage," the voice was saying, "but as ever, the old order changeth, yielding place to new, and ours is not to reason why, after all. So when they offered me the film contract, why, naturally I saw it was time to push off and seek a newer world." The intonation and style were Terence's, but the voice wasn't.

I turned.

It was Baine.

Or rather, it was William Callahan, as I supposed we'd have to think of him now. But that wasn't right either. What was it Verity had said his stage name was?

"Bertram Fauntleroy," sighed a woman next to me, pressing a hand against her chest and threatening to swoon. "O! He's such a perfect gentleman!" Her ecstatic expression was mirrored in at least two dozen female faces, all turned worshipfully in his direction.

"I think," Verity whispered, "I just saw Tossie slip into the tea room. Shall we join her?"

When we made our way to what Verity had called a tea room, and which was, in fact, the only one of the Grand's three restaurants that appeared to seat unaccompanied women, it took us no time at all to spot Tossie. She was in loud raptures over Princess Arjumand, and utterly ignoring the pained admonitions of the headwaiter, who was trying to convince her to remove the cat from the restaurant. He hadn't noticed the dog, but I did at once: Cyril was seated beneath the table, grinning out at us from underneath the white linen folds of tablecloth that met the floor, or would have done if not for Cyril. And that meant the couple seated with their backs to us must be--

"Ned!" Terence had turned to see what Cyril was looking at, and now rose to his feet in delight. For several minutes there was a confusion of joyful greetings and explanations. Terence and Maud, it turned out, were taking a sort of belated honeymoon, spending a few weeks in New York, accompanying her uncle, who was giving some sort of lecture series. Tossie and her "beloved husband" were enjoying their last week there; they'd depart in the New Year for California. Verity and I, I improvised wildly, had been touring America, and would be returning home in a few days.

During the flurry of meeting Maud at last I'd lost track of what Tossie was telling Verity. I glanced their way once I was seated.

"And look what I've found," Tossie said, reaching into her reticule and producing a pack of cards. I felt myself blanch, but Verity went on calmly sipping tea. "Aren't they the cunningest little things? Look at all the dear little foreign symbols!"

"Quite nice," Maud agreed politely. "Where did you get them?"

"Someone left them in the lobby," Tossie explained, "and I turned them in, and when no one claimed them the manager brought them back to me. Look, they have the same cute little Chinese squiggle at the bottom of every card! I wonder does it mean anything?"

"Japanese," Maud said gently. "And it means 'Leave Luck to Heaven.'" Verity winced.

Tossie pouted, looking displeased at having been handed the information she'd just asked for, and then brightened. "Someday when I have a family crest, that could be my motto!" she said happily. "No one could be more lucky than I've been, after all. And Mama, once she forgives me, will surely be pleased when I commission a crest. Or maybe my darling husband will found a film company, and that can be written over the door."

"I don't think you should," Verity said calmly. "Use the symbol, I mean. After all, cousin, we have only dear Mrs. St. Trewes' assurance that it means any such thing. What if she's made an error?" Maud looked indignant, as well she might, and Tossie just pouted some more and slipped the cards back into her reticule. Then her eyes lifted to something above and behind us, and her whole face got a rapturous look.

"Husband!" she said, sighing devotedly, and looking nearly as close to swooning as the hordes of female fans in the hotel lobby had done. I turned to find Baine, whom I was evidently doomed to go on thinking of as "Baine" no matter how often I corrected myself, smiling fondly at her, and then at all the rest of us.

"Perhaps," he said to me, once all greetings were done and he'd gently reminded Tossie that she should head upstairs to nap, "you might accompany us to our rooms, Mr. Henry. I've been hoping we'd meet again, so that I might talk to you."

Before we left, Tossie cooed her pleasure at having had a chance to meet up with her "dearum, dearums Juju" for "one last time." "To think," she exclaimed to Terence, "that when I wrote to you, I thought never to see her again!"

"One last time?" Terence repeated in bewilderment. "But won't you want to keep her?"

Tossie coloured prettily, and said that she expected that once they reached California she'd have no time to care for Princess Arjumand as well as she deserved, and for the first time I realized she was wearing a tea gown cut even more loosely that Verity's, and guessed at why she was supposed to be taking an afternoon nap.  
Upstairs, Tossie disappeared into one room of their suite, and Baine brought me into another and poured us up two glasses of straight whiskey, with all the silent skill and calm self-assurance he'd last displayed as a butler. It was oddly satisfying, seeing him as master of his own domain, and I felt a stab of pure contentment at what the continuum had wrought.

"Baine," I said from habit, and then corrected myself. "I mean, Mr. Callahan."

He smiled. "I must be destined never to earn my living under my own name," he said. "I've dropped it again now, in favour of a stage name."

"I hadn't realized you had ambitions to be on the stage. Or in film," I said.

He looked slightly embarrassed. "I fear philosophy proved a less than adequate source of income," he said. "And now that no longer have only my own welfare to consider--"

I held up one hand to interrupt him. "You don't need to explain," I said. And he didn't; it was difficult enough making ends meet on two historians' salaries. I couldn't imagine what sort of nightmare it would be to try to support Tossie as a philosopher. "And how is Mrs. Callahan?" I ventured, hoping this wasn't some breach of etiquette, but too morbidly curious not to ask.

He looked delighted I'd asked, so it must not have been. "Is well," he confirmed. "I never shall be able to repay you, you know." I couldn't help but think he was right--surely there was no adequate repayment for a lifetime with Tossie, though hanging might come close--but I assured him I'd done nothing at all.

"If there's anything, anything at all, I can do for you, you have only to ask," he said seriously. "Are you and Mrs. Henry staying here at the Grand?"

"We haven't booked a room," I said, realizing belatedly that we probably should have. Baine looked unruffled. "Melford," he said, and a young man appeared suddenly. "Have rooms booked for Mr. and Mrs. Henry, will you." It wasn't a question, but at least he managed to sound more respectful than the Merings ever had when addressing him. The assistant nodded, and disappeared again.

"There was something I wanted to ask you." He looked at me steadily for a moment. "I couldn't help but notice, Mr. Henry--"

"Ned," I interrupted. Next to Terence, he was the person I'd liked most from Muchings End, after all.

"I couldn't help but notice, Ned, that none of your clothes--such as could be retrieved--were your own."

I couldn't think of an explanation, and felt a moment of irrational panic--irrational because it didn't matter, after all, now that we were no longer staying with the Merings, that he'd guessed something was amiss. But the sense that I'd been found out left me momentarily lost for words.

"Water might account for shrinkage of some of your clothes," he continued, "but not of the shoes."

I still hadn't thought of an answer.

"Of course I understand," he went on after a few moments, "that a gentleman of your class might not feel comfortable confiding in a former servant."

"Oh, no!" I was utterly horrified. "No, it isn't that at all. It's just...there's no explanation I can give you that won't sound impossible."

"There are a lot of reasons why a young gentleman might want to stay in a country house under an assumed name," he mused, "and not all of them are criminal. But very few of them, in my experience, are unbelievable."

I couldn't have been time-lagged, because this was the first drop I'd done in ages, so I had no excuse for what happened next. I told him. Not everything, but the essentials: how I'd first met Verity, who and what we were, why we'd been at Muchings End. Midway through I found myself hoping he'd assume I was mad. Or drunk. Perhaps I was drunk; the whiskey certainly had a considerable kick to it.

"It sounds utter nonsense," he said admiringly. "Worse nonsense than Alice in Wonderland. So what, then, brings you here now?" I couldn't tell if he was humouring me.

"Those cards of Tossie's," I said. "We were sent back to get them."

"So they are valuable, then?" He sounded surprisingly disinterested; perhaps he already knew he was destined to make his fortune in films. Certainly if the hubbub in the lobby was anything to go by, his popularity was already considerable.

"No," I said firmly. "Not valuable. It's just that they shouldn't be here, and it could be dangerous to leave them here. They got brought from Japan by another historian, and he never should have left them."

Baine downed the last of his drink. It didn't seem to be having any effect whatsoever on him. "Then I'll have Tossie return them to you at once," he said soothingly.

But there was no chance. A half hour later we heard her shouting at someone, and Baine knocked at the door and entered her room. When I cautiously followed him, reasonably assured from her shrieks of anger that nothing private was happening, I found her berating a hotel maid, who stood, sobbing but unapologetic, next to the fireplace.

"They're the Devil's picture book," she insisted, between sobs. "I couldn't leave them with you, ma'am."

"This young woman has destroyed the cards," Baine informed me. "Burnt them, in fact. Will that be a problem?"

I thought about it. Would it? Probably not. After all, they couldn't cause an incongruity now. And if the historian who'd left them behind really needed them, he could damned well come back himself, and sneak into Tossie's room to steal them while she slept. "No," I told him. "I think that solves the problem neatly."

But it raised one other question. Why had the continuum brought Fujisaki's student here to lose the cards, causing us to return to steal the cards, if the cards were going to be reduced to nonsignificance anyway? Perhaps the continuum was less all-knowing than I'd given it credit for, and it hadn't guessed we'd come back for them. Or perhaps we were just one of those redundancies built into the system, meant as a failsafe in case the maid had failed to show up.

"If it's any consolation," I said as I left, "your wife can always invest in this gentleman's company. Apparently it's going to pay off hugely." I handed him the business card the student I'd rescued from traffic had given me.

Baine raised one eyebrow. "A business tip from the future?" His voice was so polite I couldn't tell if that was sarcasm or not.

"No," I told him. "From a complete stranger."

I went back for Verity, and once we were safely back in our room I filled her in on what had happened. "And what," I asked, "was with your critique of Maud's translation?"

She looked amused. "I couldn't take the chance that Tossie would really use that slogan for anything," she said. "Or, worse yet, use it in the original Japanese." At my confused look she went on, "'Leave luck to heaven. I recognized it--in Japanese, that's 'Nintendo,' and having Tossie found a company with that name would have been an obvious incongruity."

A discreet knock at the door proved to be Baine; I ushered him in, murmuring "he knows all" to a scandalized Verity, and shrugging apologetically.

"It looks," he said politely, "as if you didn't need to be here to remove the cards after all."

"No," I agreed. "But it's an awful string of coincidences--you, and Terence and Maud, and us, all being here at once. If it wasn't for the cards, it must have been something else."

Verity shook her head, bewildered. "The continuum's brought us all together, from points scattered through the years. There must be some good reason. But I confess I don't see what it is, if it wasn't the cards."

"Some disaster to be averted," I said wearily. "It's never done anything quite like this before. We should probably be terrified. If it needed all of us, including Terence and Maud, it must have been a huge glitch."

Baine smiled. "Perhaps we should be grateful. It has, after all, brought us together again. None of us had any right to expect that."

"I'd feel more gratitude if I wasn't expecting the sky to fall."

"You believe your continuum acts deliberately. Why can't you believe it might also act with benevolence?"

"Look at history," I said, and didn't have to elaborate: Baine nodded, as aware of war and disease and disaster as any well-read man must be. "Still," he argued, "history has its happy moments, as well. Perhaps this is only meant to be one of those: an unearned gift of time together."

Verity looked thoughtful. "The days before Christmas always do feel timeless," she said wistfully. "Maybe Baine's right: maybe this little bit of time-out-of-time is just a gift to us. Something the continuum could spare for no good reason."

"Or for some very good reason," Baine corrected her. He didn't say more, but I found myself wondering what it was Baine believed. The contemps had, after all, lived in an era of more faith than ours. It was entirely possible he viewed the continuum from some unfathomable perspective of faith in the goodness of the universe. The past really is, as they say, another country.

But it was another country we had been privileged to visit, and now I found myself perilously close to Professor Peddick's Grand Design. If Verity and I were here through some act of benevolence, then the continuum was demonstrating its benevolence to us, not just to the Victorian contemps.

"You will stay, won't you?" Baine asked. "Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Surely you may as well stay out the holiday."

* * * * * * *

We left on Boxing Day. "A fitting ending," I said, but Verity shook her head.

"It can't end yet," she said. "We haven't had the part where the detectives talk everything over, and show how all the details fit in." So we headed off to find T.J., who could no doubt wrap this up with a few blurry sims.  
We found him having tea and plum cake, of all things, with Mr. Dunworthy and Elizabeth Bittner. Verity shot me a Significant Look.

"There isn't one," T.J. said reluctantly, when we asked what incongruity we'd been correcting, and why, since the cards had been destroyed, we'd needed to go back at all. "It isn't the cards--or saving Mr. Hollerith--or anything else I could find. I've run dozens of models, and I can't find a focus that would explain the slippage. It looks like Fujisaki's student got dumped here for no particular reason. It was a nonsensical piece of geographical slippage. And so was your being shunted off to America. But one of our researchers did find this. It's Lady Shrapnell's great-great-great grandmother."

Verity was squinting at the back of a sepia photograph. "How odd."

I reached for it. It was difficult to find the baby, buried as it was beneath the froth of lace and ruffles that passed for a Christening dress. I located a round little face beneath a ribbon-bedecked bonnet. The headgear did nothing to conceal the steely determination in those round little eyes, and there was a Lady Schrapnell-esque set to the tiny chin. I shuddered.

But it had been the back of the picture Verity had been frowning over. I turned the photo over. Calamity Margaret Callahan, aged two weeks, 1890. I smiled.

"Born just in time for the 1890 census," TJ said. "The first census tabulated by computer."

"Is that relevant?" I asked.

He shrugged. "It could be," he said. "The great-great-great-great-Grandmother's husband--"

"Baine," Verity supplied.

"Fauntleroy," he corrected. "He invested heavily in Herman Hollerith's tabulating machines."

"Goodness," I said weakly. "Did it pay off?"

"Not immediately," TJ admitted. "But the family held onto the shares, and they became quite valuable later, when the company turned into IBM."

I felt pleased on Baine's behalf, though I still didn't see why I'd needed to be there--surely Baine could have saved Hollerith, or, failing that, could have heard about the opportunity to invest from someone else. But I thought about what Baine had said about benevolence, and about what it meant about the universe if the continuum had acted not just to preserve itself, but out of sheer gratuitous kindness. "Perhaps it really did just want to give us all a chance to be together again," I said out loud. Verity smiled her naiad's smile at me.

"I love you," she said.


End file.
